The Boxing Cats (Prof. Welton's)

You thought Charlie Chaplin invented slapstick? Pfah! How typical. I bet your favorite show is MTV as well, isn't it? And you listen to 50 Cent? Kids these days.

This Edison short is hilarious, although you have to be very tired when watching it. Exhausted, in fact. But it will get a laugh out of anyone who enjoys silly comedy in the vein of Dumb and Dumber, Monthy Python, etc.

10/10. The first, and one of the funniest, comedies I've ever seen. Great sight gags and the film doesn't go on so long it wears out its welcome.(r#11)

A great many of the earliest Edison Kinetoscope movies featured popular performers who presented samples of their vaudeville acts or other similar specialties. There were also a fair number of early Edison features that showed boxing. This short movie combines the two genres, and it also demonstrates rather efficient composition in its use of the camera.

Professor Henry Welton apparently had an entire vaudeville act that featured cats trained to perform all kinds of tricks, so that the "Boxing Cats" routine was really only one of many such routines in the full show. The high popularity of boxing at the time probably made this a fairly obvious choice for the Edison crew to film.

The footage shows a tiny boxing ring, with the cats batting away at each other with their paws. The camera field catches the entire ring plus Welton behind it, looking on, so that even in a limited field it includes the entire scene. The miniature boxing gloves on their forepaws makes it look much like human boxing of a kind. It seems to have been largely harmless for the cats involved, since the gloves would probably have prevented them from inflicting any injuries on each other.

The footage itself is mildly entertaining, and the movie is also worthy of note as an example of the content and technique in the early Kinetoscope films.

"fWhen "movies" first began""...... I am tired of hearing it. Can we please stop patronising the past. In 1894 they filmed novelty acts just as they would continue to do throughout the decade and beyond. The genre became particularly common iafter the inroduction of the newreel and the "magazine" (c. 1909) and the highpoint for this kind of spectacle in the cinema probably occurrs in the twenties and thirties when such material filled the newreels shown certainly with other films but also shown in the many specialist newsreel cinemas which continued to exist until the advent of television. After which such novelty items continued to be filmed in just the same way for the small screen and they are today to be found all over the internet. There has been no very noticeable change in the nature of such films at any time.

This is not a every wonderful film. Edison films are extremely poor both with respect to quality and content compared with the work, just a few years later, of the Lumière operators in France which effectively pushed Edison and the rival Mutoscope company both to abandon peephole exhibition and to broaden and improve the content and quality of their films. But novelty acts involving acrobats, magicians, trained animals and so on remained part of the repertoire of all film companies until the 1910s when they began to be included in the newsreels and film magazines where they would remain until the advent of television. All that changes is the way the repertoire is organised and then the particular medium that transmits them. To confirm this fact, jsut do a google search for "boxing cats"....

The cats in this movie must have retired from showbiz by now. At least I hope so

Boxing Cats (Prof. Welton's), The (1894)

**** (out of 4)

When "movies" first came to be, studios would often just grab their cameras and film something popular and then release it to the thousands who wanted to see it. Professor Welton was a popular vaudeville act and his main highlight was two cats, wearing boxing gloves, who would do battle in the ring. PETA members will certainly want to stay away as the Professor holds the cats by their backs and makes this box. While some might object to this I find the overall film rather innocent, charming and fun. Seeing the cats go at it for around thirty-seconds might not be entertainment like we expect today but I'm sure it was a riot back in the day.